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  • Batya Gur:Mystery and Israeli History
  • Cushing Strout (bio)
Murder in Jerusalem by Batya Gur translated by Evan Fallenberg (HarperCollins, 2006. 388 pages. $24.95)

The classic detective story, as David Lehman explains in The Perfect Murder (1989), needs "a place that runs on its own clocks, able to keep the world at large from encroaching on its privileged boundaries." Its characters are essentially living outside of history. [End Page xl] Batya Gur's series of novels about the Israeli detective Michael Ohayon appear to illustrate the point. She has chosen relatively closed communities for settings, which help reveal the disruptive effect of crime in a civilized environment, whether it be a psychoanalytic institute, a university's literary seminar, a kibbutz, or an orchestra.

Lehman notes that "the gain for realism was considerable when whodunit writers began to capitalize on the perception that our working and social lives provide us with countless opportunities for closed murders." He could have cited Gur as a prime example, except for the fact that her first novel, The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case, was not published in America until 1992, three years after he wrote his book. Yet her novels are not as insulated from history as his definition of the classic form prescribes. Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case (1994) deals with generational conflict over the kibbutz system. It is in her last two novels, however, Bethlehem Road Murder (2004) and Murder in Jerusalem (2006), that actual Israeli history plays an essential part in the present action of her stories. Her detective, Michael Ohayon, appropriately enough, was once inclined to become a university historian.

In Bethlehem Road Ohayon is furious that his colleagues have made a locked-door interrogation of a Palestinian building contractor, who had come to testify about finding a body in the top floor of an apartment building that was to be renovated. Meanwhile, outside in the streets not far away, Arab women are protesting the arrest of demonstrators, "their husbands, their brothers, their sons." The controversy at the heart of the story, however, is an old one: an investigative journalist believes that thousands of Yemenite children disappeared between 1949 and 1954, and some promoters of Yemenite culture blame Ashkenazi Jews for the scandal. The controversy persists today.

Ohayon's mentor, Emmanuel Shorer, expresses a moderate and plausible view that the immigrant camps had to be evacuated because of floods and the difficulty of finding food. The adopting parents, he says, were people who could not have children of their own. A lawyer, in talking about the vanished children who were sent to foster homes or given out for adoption, says in his own defense of having such a child: "You always live at the expense of somebody else." He cites the concentration camps and "what Jews did to each other in order to stay alive, and these are people you can't judge." He mentions a book by an enthusiastic Zionist, Theodor Herzl, who dreams about the new state, and his vision describes Palestine "as if there are no Arabs." Why? The lawyer explains: "Because if he had taken them into account, he would have really had to have taken them into account."

Gur breaks with the classic detective story's reassuring restoration of order after the murderer has been found out. In the end, Ohayon, looking back on the events he has investigated, tells his girlfriend: "Even what looks like order is disorder, and even what looks like regularity is chaos." Nor is any immediate justice meted out to the guilty at the end of the story. An Israeli detective story could not be credible as a version of pastoral. [End Page xli]

Murder in Jerusalem, a posthumously published novel with a handsome cover displaying a photograph of the city, is celebrated on its jacket flap as "one last fascinating visit to an always tumultuous land, in the company of a writer and a detective so many devoted readers have loved so well." The novel was developed from a television miniseries she helped write, and the novel's setting is Israel's official television station. This location has the advantage of providing a limited community of...

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